


Starstruck

by poeticname



Category: Kamen Rider Fourze
Genre: F/F, Pre-Relationship, Teen Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-18 06:22:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20634551
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/poeticname/pseuds/poeticname
Summary: Yuuki has no clue how she’s going to impress Tomoko during their first one-on-one hangout, but she’s determined to succeed anyways.





	Starstruck

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KazuoKiriyama](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KazuoKiriyama/gifts).

Today’s visit is not the first time Yuuki has been in Tomoko's room, and yet walking through the door sends Yuuki’s heart into overdrive in a way it didn't last time. 

The room looks the same, with its abundance of butterflies, curtains, and witch figurines on full display, but the familiarity of the room isn't particularly calming when part of the familiar surroundings is all the porcelain dolls that seem to stare at Yuuki and on top of that the moment of truth she's been waiting for all morning is finally here:

Yuuki is alone with Tomoko for the very first time, and just as expected Yuuki doesn't know what to do.

Tomoko, for her part, sits down on her bed and looks at Yuuki. Yuuki stands in the doorway and wills herself to be less nervous.

"You might want to close the door, my mom is still here."

"Oh, yeah, of course," that seems like a good first step so Yuuki closes the door, but she continues to stand in front of it, surveying the room again to make sure she doesn't bump into anything. "Did you have a reptile tank in here last time? Did I not notice that?”

"It's new," Tomoko says, simply, still looking directly at Yuuki. "There's nothing in there yet, so don't bother looking all that closely."

Yuuki could swear there's something, the inside’s decorated and shadow-y in a way that makes it look like a snake could emerge at any moment, but Yuuki trusts Tomoko so she moves on and sits on the bed beside her.

Silence stretches between them for a moment. Tomoko is still making eye contact with Yuuki and though Yuuki can manage her ‘pretty girl is near me’ jitters around Tomoko in usual circumstances, all of this is a bit much at once. Yuuki feels like she has to talk or she’s going to explode.

“How long have you been collecting all this stuff?”

Tomoko blinks at her as Yuuki nervously gestures to their surroundings.

“The bugs, the dolls… They’re collections, right?”

Tomoko nods, “Of a sort, yes. The dolls are more a collection than the insects, which I gained an interest in as spell materials, components for attracting the energies I wanted in this room… I’ve always loved dolls though.”

“Ooh, like when you were little?”

“Yes, that kind of always,” Tomoko gets off the bed, heading over to one of her particularly cluttered tables. “Some of them have been in my possession as long as I can remember.”

She reaches behind what looks to be an altar and retrieves a doll so old that her eyes are painted on the same material as the rest of her body, and one of those eyes is flaking off in places. The white parts of her mostly blue lacy dress also look somewhat dirtied, but clearly none of this diminishes Tomoko’s affection for the doll as she brings it back to her bed and sits it in her lap with a smile.

“This is Charlotte, I found her in my grandparents’ house at a very young age.”

Unable to think of anything else to do, Yuuki waves down at the doll.

Tomoko, still smiling, moves the doll’s arm to wave back at Yuuki. It should be creepy, that might even be what Tomoko is going for, but in Yuuki’s addled state she can only focus on how Tomoko’s smile seems sincere and she’s really cute.

Yuuki quickly looks down at the doll, urging herself to get a grip and keep the conversation going, “That’s cool, she looks really… Historical?”

Tomoko nods approvingly and Yuuki can physically feel herself relax.

“I researched her age once and she’s likely around sixty years old,” Tomoko turns the doll around so she can examine it herself as she speaks, giving Yuuki an opportunity to collect herself. “At such an age she should be quite potent, yet I’ve never seen signs of activity from her.”

“Have you… Seen signs from any of the other ones?”

“Yuuki.”

Tomoko’s looking at her quite seriously. Startled by the eye contact, Yuuki tenses up again.

“Wouldn’t you be scared if I told you about that?”

Yuuki doesn’t know how to handle a lot of things about hanging out with Tomoko, but she had definitely resolved to be a little less scared of Tomoko’s interests before coming here today, even if she’s only been succeeding because she’s distracted.

If she wants the two of them to get closer, she’s going to have to be clear about that resolve out loud, of course.

“I want to know,” Yuuki replies, making sure to return Tomoko’s eye contact evenly. “You’re my friend, you should feel free to tell me anything!”

Tomoko seems surprised, quickly looking back down at the doll in her lap. She seems a bit shy, something Yuuki’s never seen from her before.

“Well, the answer is no anyways. I haven’t seen any activity from them in years.”

Tomoko gets up and puts the doll—Charlotte, Yuuki reminds herself—back on the table where she got it. There’s definitely a bit of shyness in her posture, with the way she’s not meeting Yuuki’s eyes right now. Yuuki’s pretty sure it’s a good kind of shyness, the kind following something like a compliment, and that definitely feels like progress. 

“Say, Yuuki…”

Yuuki tilts her head curiously as Tomoko turns to face her again, seemingly back to normal with a smile on her face that suggests she’s got an idea that she finds very exciting.

“If you are prepared to know of my interests in the occult, what would you think of participating in a ritual?”

Although she wants to be supportive, Yuuki can't help but frown at that, “Like the time with the Altar Zodiarts and her friends?”

“No, something much simpler than that,” Tomoko tells her, while moving around the room to close her curtains, blocking off all outside light. “This spell only needs me, and isn’t so drastic. All you need to do is close your eyes.”

“What will this ritual do?”

Tomoko walks over to the light switch, looking at Yuuki evenly, “If you agree to it, you will see when you open your eyes.”

Yuuki’s heart is back to beating hard enough to launch a rocket, so loud in Yuuki’s ears that if Tomoko weren’t across the room Yuuki would worry she could hear it. 

Yuuki feels like this is it; she’s really on the precipice of Tomoko maybe possibly being impressed by her.

“I’ll do it!”

Yuuki sits up straight, holding her hands firmly in her lap and scrunching her eyes closed.

Tomoko chuckles in her semi-dark way, but it doesn’t sound quite as menacing as usual, “You can relax, stiffness of the body is not a requirement for the spell.”

Yuuki nods, but wanting to get everything right, only lets her hands relax, not her face.

Tomoko sighs, sounding almost fond though that might be Yuuki’s wishful thinking, and flips the light switch.

Before Yuuki even has time to process that the room’s a lot darker than she thought it would be, Tomoko starts to recite.

Yuuki doesn’t understand the words at all, but she recognizes the tone of them as words Tomoko has spoken many times. There’s a relaxed pace to them that calms Yuuki, might even have put her to sleep if she weren’t extremely aware that Tomoko’s only a small distance away from her, might have succeeded in lulling her into a nap anyways if they’d gone on any longer but after what Yuuki can only guess has been a couple minutes, Tomoko stops.

“You can open your eyes now.”

When Yuuki does, there are stars on the ceiling.

They are glow-in-the-dark stars but even granting that, the scope of them is impressive. There are so many that there are only slivers of the actual ceiling, and they are so meticulously placed that Yuuki can immediately recognize Tomoko arranged them in imitation of the actual sky.

Yuuki looks down for a moment just to check how Tomoko’s reacting, and though she can’t see Tomoko’s face in detail, she does appear to be smiling.

Yuuki beams back at her, “These are so cool!”

“I thought you would like them,” Tomoko says, walking towards the bed where Yuuki’s still sitting down. “When I first developed an affinity for the moon I put them up.”

“I don’t recognize the slice of sky you used, but you copied a star map, right?”

Tomoko sits down on the bed beside Yuuki, definitely looking pleased, “I copied many maps, thinking I could create my own constellations.”

Yuuki gasps. She grabs Tomoko’s hands before she can even think about it, looking into her eyes as deeply as she can.

“You need to tell me all about them.”

Getting this close was probably a mistake—if Yuuki weren’t so excited about stars she wouldn’t have done it at all—but Tomoko takes it in stride. Now that they’re close, Yuuki can even clearly see Tomoko’s grin.

“Well, first, if you look at the spot above the tank, that is a bat by the name of Gideon, the first constellation I created, though not the most important being in this cosmology.”

Yuuki looks, and as Tomoko tells her the story of Gideon, and a butterfly next to it that she calls Sylvain, and the nameless eyes looking over the two of them, and all the other constellations she invented over what turns out to be the course of years, Yuuki listens.

She’s not sure that she entirely understands what Tomoko’s telling her. She was always bad in literature class and Tomoko’s stories give her the same feeling that finishing a reading for lit does, like she’s looking into a fish tank and seeing a world she'll never really understand, but she doesn’t mind that so much when Tomoko’s so clearly passionate, and she’s so clearly telling Yuuki about something very important to her.

It’s a little hard to focus sometimes because Tomoko is still holding one of Yuuki’s hands, and she’s just let it stay like that, but Yuuki thinks listening is more important right now and she can freak out about that later.

In a moment when Tomoko’s already gone through a few stories, the two of them have shifted to be sitting against a wall, and Yuuki’s eyes have adjusted to the dark enough to start gauging Tomoko’s reactions again, Yuuki finally manages to ask the second question that occurred to her, after her excitement about space cleared enough for her to think again.

“So if these are glow-in-the-dark stars, what was the spell for?”

Tomoko looks at Yuuki curiously, “Which spell?”

“When you had me closing my eyes, you recited a spell.”

“Ah, that one,” Tomoko looks down at her lap, the strange shyness Yuuki saw earlier returning to her. “You can just forget about that.”

Yuuki pouts, “Please tell me?”

Tomoko takes her hand away, turning the rest of herself away as well, “Really, it’s nothing. Think of it as an enhancement to the glow.”

“I told you earlier that you should feel free to tell me anything, didn’t I? I wouldn’t think less of you for anything.”

Tomoko turns back to her slightly, “You’re quite certain about that.”

Yuuki nods vigorously. Tomoko pauses for a moment in the silence, starting to pout a little herself.

“Well. Then the embarrassing truth is that I thought some atmosphere-building might impress you.”

Yuuki’s heart leaps in her chest.

“Tomoko! You don’t have to do that.”

Tomoko turns away again, “Then what should I do…”

“Be yourself, I’m already impressed!”

That was probably another misstep, the worrying part of Yuuki’s brain tells her, except it’s definitely wrong because Tomoko turns back and she looks truly, obviously, pleased.

“You are?”

Yuuki nods again, scooting up to the edge of the bed so Tomoko won’t be able to tell that she’s blushing, “Yeah, so you should tell me more about your cool stars so you can impress me even more.”

Tomoko laughs a little, moving to sit beside Yuuki again. Their hands brush, and Yuuki tries not to look too excited about it, “Then point out one of my stars, and I’ll tell you some more stories.”

As Yuuki points at a dot above where she thinks Charlotte is placed and Tomoko starts telling her about a wolf, Yuuki sits in quiet awe of the story that sounds so much like a real myth, the girl beside her, and the fact that really, spending time with her was nothing to worry about at all.


End file.
